The void that Paul Vallas leaves

Chicago Public Schools chief Paul Vallas on Wednesday finally cried uncle. In a meeting with the Tribune editorial board, he confirmed plans to announce his resignation within the next few days.

Along with Gery Chico, Vallas has presided over an impressive, if incomplete, turnaround of a deeply troubled urban school district. When Mayor Richard Daley appointed the duo to run the schools in 1995, he had no idea he was about to strike gold. Vallas was the bean counter from the mayor's budget office; Chico was the savvy politico as the mayor's chief of staff.

Put at the helm of the city's nearly 600 schools, these bureaucrats suddenly became revolutionaries. They set out to break eggshells. Vallas, as it turned out, ended up breaking the most.

Vallas made decisions rather than call for more research. He figured out clever ways to use money and leverage more of it, rather than make excuses for never having enough. He helped teachers raise achievement standards and saw test scores rise.

He gained the confidence of neighborhood groups and even teachers by showing up everywhere, answering every question and being the last to leave. The run-on mouth that got him into so much trouble with the mayor won points with parents who appreciated his accessibility and wonkish passion for education.

Vallas, lest the mayor forget, helped establish Daley's worldwide reputation as the man who turned around a system that a decade ago appeared beyond reform. He provided a model that other urban school districts, Cleveland and New York City among them, have already replicated or are looking to emulate.

Vallas helped accomplish this in six years, for comparatively little pay, without getting caught up in sweetheart deals, gross mismanagement schemes or other scandals--which, sad to say, is no small feat in Chicago.

And yet Daley has spent recent months sending less-than-direct and needlessly public signals that he wanted Vallas out. Often his signals had the subtlety of a hiccup; if one weren't properly schooled in 11th Ward body language, they were easy to miss. The effect has been discredit by a thousand cuts. And so a nationally admired era of Chicago school reform leadership comes to an abrupt end.

Vallas' primary offense was that he lost his sense of place.He violated Lesson One: If you're invited to the Daley Dance, never stay too long. And never draw bigger headlines than the host.

Certainly there's a question of possible backsliding now that Daley has created two huge holes at the same time. They leave just the kind of vacuum that wasteful administrators and lazy principals love.

It may well be time for fresh blood. But Daley had better have great replacements up his sleeve, because it's a stretch to think all the dramatic improvements in student achievement of the first six years of reform will continue without extraordinary leadership.

The mayor owes it to the progress that has been made to fill those positions with people who are more than just competent bureaucrats and unthreatening lackeys. They need to be fresh talents who think creatively, move quickly and care deeply about educating children.